Open Ended

A story changes you when you hear it or read it or see it. It reaches inside of us and lets us see parts of ourselves that were always there, waiting to be seen. Another facet on occasion given light, sometimes, a hidden or lost coin within our souls, something of immense value brought into the field of our awareness. I’ve always loved a good story-both to hear it and to tell it. Whether it’s actually historical doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. When we go through good fiction you have lived it and it has been and is part of who we are-we are the ones who have lived and are here to tell the tale.

Good stories keep memory, telling us who we are and what the world is around us. The tale unfolds and its backdrop is reality, sometimes explaining itself, more often, it is, simply landscape, but no less beautiful for it having been so. The story is predicated upon what has preceded it, keeping up what he hold today, it will change again before tomorrow and in its river like body, course on through to other times and places. The story keeps us going and we live inside of it. and are parts of it.

And so telling a story is a great responsibility because it defines-if only for a moment-reality. I’ve written events and seen them come to life, the print a strange talisman summoning forth through its letters and intention a cascade of people, situations, outcomes. The greater the story, the more the magnitude of what it becomes, opening like a vast blossom, a universal rose. Open ended, we all participate in what we’ve written and the stories that we were and become, shared are who we are.

7 comments

Every story we tell is a world we create and a world we live in… actually live in… ´cause the synapses in our brain created when we see things and the ones originated when we imagine the same things are so similar, that the brain, sometimes, get lost between realities. And that, my friend, is simply an act of magic.

The best stories and novels are the ones that say very little and let the imaginative reader fill in the details. They guide you to places and through places but let your mind populate the cracks in the ceilings and cobwebs on the mantle. That’s why I am a big fan of Cormac McCarthy. He packs more imagery in a single sentence than other authors do in a chapter. You have to work hard to chew Cormac’s sentences, but once you’ve swallowed them they are nutritious for your mind.